LONG AND
WINDING ROADS
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
BANARAS KHAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Locals collect fuel from a
bullet-ridden Nato supply
oil tanker in Pakistan after
an attack set ablaze about
19 tankers carrying fuel
for US led Nato forces to
Afghanistan.
“Of course we built too much,” a British official told the Guardian. “We didn’t
think about how the Afghans would pay
for it. But it was understandable. Nobody
is blaming the military. We wanted to
show them what we could do for them,
but without regard for sustainability.”
A DIFFICULT BUSINESS
In the 1980s, Andrew Wilder worked as
an aid worker with Save the Children
in Afghanistan. At the time, Wilder had
seen that the most effective programs
— in, for instance, health care — tended
by their nature to be the least promotable. Efforts that emphasized education
and prevention (like instructing villagers to wash their hands after using the
bathroom) had a far greater impact on
infection rates than more attractive and
press-ready projects like building
hospitals and clinics.
But as national security objectives
increasingly came into play, money
and attention kept shifting away from
the projects that worked, and toward
the ones that supposedly helped
“isolate the Taliban.”
It’s a problem, he says, that has
plagued development spending ever
since: No one’s ever held a ribbon-cutting